You’ve got to hand it to Charles Busch: He doesn’t make it easy for his audience. The title character of his latest comedy, “Olive and the Bitter Herbs,” has to be the sourest puss on the New York stage this year. Making someone this unlikable your lead takes guts.
And yet by the end, you almost start finding Olive . . . kind of sweet.
Presented by Primary Stages, the show comes a year after Busch’s nun-movie spoof “The Divine Sister,” in which he also starred. But “Olive” is much less campy, closer in sensibility to his 2000 Broadway hit “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.” Tellingly, this time Busch is staying behind the scenes, and not playing 70-something Olive Fisher himself.
That tricky job falls to Marcia Jean Kurtz (“The Loman Family Picnic”), and, to her credit, she doesn’t soften up the edges — even if you wonder what “Allergist” star Linda Lavin would have done with the part.
An embittered actress whose claim to fame is a 1980s sausage commercial, Olive is convinced everybody’s out to get her.
“There’s something in my body chemistry that provokes people to hurt me,” she tells best friend Wendy (Julie Halston, Busch’s longtime muse). Since attack is the best defense, Olive lashes out. She calls the co-op board president “a pretentious, overly Botoxed, ageist pig.” Her gay neighbors, Robert (David Garrison) and Trey (Dan Butler), are “the monsters next door.”
Olive is the little old lady of your nightmares to the power of a hundred, and much of the fun comes from the confrontation between her old-school kvetching and Trey’s queeny bitchery. “The elderly aren’t great at rinsing out their glasses,” he says, turning down a drink. “You can practically see the E. coli prancing.”
And yet there are chinks in Olive’s armor. She’s crestfallen after her part in a TV crime show is mostly cut, and grudgingly accepts the attentions of a kind widower, Sylvan (Richard Masur).
She also looks vulnerable when staring into her Kips Bay apartment’s big mirror. The mysterious Howard she sees in the reflection turns out to link all the characters through improbable coincidences. But as a series of serendipitous revelations takes over the second act, Busch and director Mark Brokaw strain to maintain the pace.
Impishly, “Olive and the Bitter Herbs” works best when the fur flies. It’s a great reminder that for some New Yorkers, rudeness is an art form.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com